Archive for the ‘Language in advertising’ Category

Jizzball

January 4, 2017

(Obviously, sexual content, so not to everyone’s taste.)

On AZBlogX yesterday, in “Johnny Rapid at the jizz ball”:

It started with a device for simulating ejaculation in making porn movies, called a jizz ball (or jizz-ball [or jizzball]) in an episode of (the American) Queer as Fuck (in which the character Emmett becomes an on-line pornstar). That led to jizz ball ‘orgy’, especially a gang scene with one person as focus (a scene I’m familiar with in an all-male context). And specifically to a scene from the 2012 video Jizz Orgy: Winning Ball (from Men.com) in which Johnny Rapid takes on four members of a soccer team (played by Blaze, Brad Foxx, Leo Forte, and Rafael Alencar). Johnny has a jizz ball!

(with four shots of Johnny Rapid in action).

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Pharmaceutical morning names

December 24, 2016

Today’s morning name, an AZ name: AstraZeneca. Which of course led me quickly to the singer Astrud Zeneca.

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Blue-Emu

November 20, 2016

Being heavily advertised on cable television: Blue-Emu spray for pain relief (a relatively recent addition to the company’s line of ointments). You can watch baseball great Johnny Bench flogging both the spray and the original emu oil creme in the video here. The spray:

(#1)

Originally I thought this must be a joke: emu oil? blue emu oil? But no.

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Apostrophic moments

November 18, 2016

Punctuating possessives and plurals in writing English is something of a minefield; possessive plural forms like ladies’ and women’s are especially tricky, and quite a few writers of English would prefer to see the system both rationalized and simplified — in particular to use the apostrophe to signal “grammatical morpheme s” and to place it regularly before the s. That gives us the “greengrocer’s apostrophe”, as in two eggplant’s.

It also gives us possessive plurals like kid’s, as in this ad photo for CheapesTees:

(#1)

But wait, there’s more.

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True Confessions Ripped from the Tabloids

November 6, 2016

(Well yes, men’s bodies, and lots of gay innuendo, but nothing to frighten the horses.)

Headline in The Gaily Male:

“How Giacomo ‘Giacco’ Giaccone’s
SuperSnapJock made me into a sniveling bitch”

  (#1)

Big
Jimmy ruled the
Gym with a thumb of
Steel – one
Snap of his
Strap made the
Strongest man
Kneel

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Pun days

October 14, 2016

Two recent cartoons with complex puns, both requiring serious cultural knowledge. A Mother Goose and Grimm, and a Liam Francis Walsh cartoon in the October 17th New Yorker:

(#1)

(#2)

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Rainbow ads

September 5, 2016

The latest (August/September) issue of The Advocate has two themes, one long planned — it’s the LGBT travel issue — and one responding to urgent current events, the June 12 shootings at the Pulse nightclub in Orlando FL. I’m still trying to reach a state of equanimity that will allow me to post about Orlando, but LGBT travel is easy, and there are three ads in the issue that take advantage of the colors of the Pride flag to invite LGBT travelers to Williamsburg and Miami and to encourage them to drive wherever they’re going in a Nissan.

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Lance the versatile

August 13, 2016

Today from Daily Jocks, Teamm8 Activ8s Our Lad Lance:

(#1)

Lance leaps in his leggings,
Roguishly, ridiculously,
The Mustache Man of Manly Beach.

(#2)

Put a jacket on him and he’s
Mush Man.

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Dick’s rhyme

August 9, 2016

(Racy, but not, I think, officially dangerous to children and the sexually modest, unless the verb shag is over the line. Look, Austin Powers: The Spy Who Shagged Me came out in 19 – bloody – 99, with a PG-13 rating in the U.S.)

From Daily Jocks on the 29th (with my captions):

(#1)

Dick is a CHEEKY LAD,
Bit of fun, bit of bad,
Acts the monkey,
With his banana:

(#2)

Fancied Davy in a trunk, Davy in a brief.
Davy came to my house, where ‘e shagged me beef,
‘E shagged me royally, right fine,
So I went to Davy’s house
And kissed him twenty time.

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Advances in the fast food world

August 9, 2016

An announcement in my Facebook feed this morning, from Adverising Age yesterday:

Burger King Introduces Whopperito, a Whopper Burrito: Tex-Mex Mashup to Be Sold Nationally From Aug. 15

Burger King’s latest new item is taking a cue from Chipotle Mexican Grill, which is still reeling from a string of foodborne illness outbreaks.

The Whopperito, which puts Whopper burger ingredients like beef, tomatoes, onions, lettuce and pickles inside a flour tortilla, will be sold nationally beginning Aug. 15 [after marketing trials in Pennsylvania]. A queso sauce replaces the mayonnaise from the hamburger.

I had two reactions. One, that the Whopperito as described in AdAge is very close to my conception of an American burrito, with (possibly) only the tomatoes and pickles outside the usual list of ingredients, though with beans (or refried beans) crucially absent, so the thing hardly looks like a hybrid food (Whopper plus burrito), but more like a stunted variant of a burrito — but then this is advertising (for Burger King, home of the Whopper), not food studies. Two, that although the name could be construed as a portmanteau (Whopper + burrito, with the shared r indicated by underlining), the first interpretation I got of the name was that it was a diminutive of Whopper, in –ito, that is, as ‘little Whopper’ — an oxymoron if I ever saw one.

Then I discovered that AdAge had spelled the name wrong. It’s Whopperrito, much more clearly a portmanteau.

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